Turn Your Blog into Inbound Marketing
There’s no better way than blogging to add fresh, relevant, and timely content to your business’ Web presence. A well-maintained and updated blog is a total must from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint, and fresh content keeps potential customers coming back for more again and again. Best of all, you don’t have to be an incredible writer to produce a blog—you simply have to provide valuable information or insight that positions you or your company as trustworthy experts in your field.
What plenty of amateur bloggers don’t know, however, is that a blog can also be an excellent platform to provide website visitors with calls to action and conversion opportunities. Virtually every business with a website built it because they were hoping for online leads. That’s a terrific goal, but oftentimes businesses don’t put much more thought into it than that. If your business is struggling to generate leads online, optimizing your blog is a great first step!
With a few tips from the pros, your blog can become a lead generation machine almost overnight. Studio Brand Collective helps small and medium-sized businesses across the Houston area achieve marketing results with their blogs that were impossible on their own. Here’s how to get started turning your blog into an inbound marketing engine:
1. Align your blog with your business goals.
If your business is working to accrue more leads in a specific sector or grow your customer base in a particular region, than these directives should inform your blog content. Plan out your blog topics and posting schedule in advance so that it coincides with big pushes by your sales team, special promotions, or trade show appearances. Your blog content should be well-aligned with what your target customers might be interested in searching for that day, week, or month.
2. Keep it short and sweet.
Don’t write a novel. People’s attention spans online are fairly short, especially if they’re multitasking or browsing on the go via mobile device. Make sure you optimize your content to be consumed quickly—that means making every word count! Use the inverted pyramid model of content creation: Put all of the most important info at the top of your article, in the title and first few sentences. For SEO purposes, make sure each blog page has at least 300 words. At the end of your post, include a call to action relevant to the content and links to other posts that the reader might be interested in.
3. Make every post a sales page.
Ideally, blog posts should offer valuable, relevant content to your target audience for free. With a little incentive, that same content can help push them into your marketing funnel and convert them into new customers. Every post needs at least one call to action (CTA) prompting a visitor to contact you, download something, shop your products, or sign up for something.
You can also offer longer, more exclusive content as bait. Host a gated piece of content providing deeper-level info, such as an in-depth guide, eBook, or a recorded webinar and offer it up for free in exchange for users’ contact information, such as their email address and phone number. They’ll get a valuable business tool and you’ll gain a lead.
4. Share every blog post.
Don’t just publish you next blog article on your website and leave it there to die. Post it everywhere! Include it in your email newsletter. Post a link on Facebook and Twitter. And don’t forget LinkedIn! LinkedIn is a terrific channel on which to post links to blog content relevant to your business contacts and leads. In fact, Business Insider states that LinkedIn generates 277 percent more leads than either Facebook or Twitter does.
5. Test your results.
Remember, you aren’t writing blog posts for fun. It’s important that they provide some benefit to your business! Pay attention to which posts and topics invite the most audience engagement and conversion and which turn out to be duds. We also recommend A/B testing various recurring elements of your blog, including image type, headlines, and types of posts published to optimize those features for lead generation and conversion.
These tips will each make a tangible difference in the results you’re getting from your blog posts. If you really want to put your blog to work, however, consider hiring the pros. Studio Brand Collective’s digital content team has produced blog content for some of Houston’s largest institutions and generated hundreds of thousands of pageviews, clicks, and lead conversions. We can work with your business to deliver fresh, optimized content that will help to bring in new customers no matter your industry.
Want to know how well your blog stacks up? Call us today at (713) 863-1141 for a free audit of your blog page and the rest of your website! Using advanced online tools, we’ll diagnose where you can improve in no time.
